This, then, is how you should pray: “
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”
- Matthew 6:9-13
The purpose of this guide is to help you learn to pray the way Jesus taught, and to rest in the assurances that prayer opens up.
In all four Gospels, the disciples explicitly ask Jesus to teach them only one thing: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). They had watched him. Jesus “often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16), and everything he did, how he loved, forgave, and drew near to people, seemed to flow from that place. When they asked him to teach them to pray, they were really asking: teach us to relate to the Father the way you do. For Jesus, prayer was not a chore. It was home.
For 2,000 years, in nearly every language on earth, God’s people have prayed these words. Since the early church, the Lord’s Prayer has been one of three basic tools of Christian formation, alongside the Apostles’ Creed and the Ten Commandments. Around the year 200, Tertullian called it a summary of the whole gospel. (On Prayer, 1) In Matthew it sits at the very centre of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ vision of life in God’s kingdom (Matthew 5–7). That is no accident. We cannot live the Sermon on the Mount by trying harder. It is a life that grows only out of knowing the Father.
The prayer moves in two directions. The first half is centred on God: your name, your kingdom, your will. Only then does it turn to us: give us, forgive us, lead us, deliver us. Like a good parent, Jesus teaches us what matters most, without neglecting what we need.
Notice, too, that there is no I or me anywhere in the prayer. Our faith is personal, but it is never private. We pray as a family.
We are all being formed by something: our habits, our screens, our algorithms. The real question is not whether we are being shaped, but who or what is shaping us. Israel prayed the Shema every morning and evening (Deuteronomy 6:4–9), not to remind God, but to remind themselves. In the same way, when we pray the Lord’s Prayer sincerely, day after day, the Spirit slowly reshapes our desires to want what God wants.
Repetition does not have to be empty. A couple married fifty years still says “I love you” every day, and it means more, not less, because they keep saying it.
The life we have with God rests on his faithfulness, not on our own. So each line of the prayer below is paired, where it fits, with one of the assurances of the Christian life, and with questions to work through on your own or with others.
“Be careful not to practise your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.” (Matthew 6:1)
Before Jesus teaches us what to pray, he teaches us how not to pray (Matthew 6:1-8). Notice that he says “when you pray,” not “if.” He expects his followers to pray.
Praying to be seen (Matthew 6:5–6). The word hypocrite meant an actor wearing a mask: one face for the crowd, another when no one is looking. Jesus tells us to go into our room, close the door, and pray to the Father who sees in secret. The Father doesn’t want performers. He wants children.
Praying empty words (Matthew 6:7–8). The pagan gods were thought to need persuading, so people prayed long and impressive prayers to get their attention. Jesus is not against long prayers or repeated ones. He prayed all night, and he prayed the same words three times in Gethsemane. He is against prayer that is disconnected from the heart. “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
If God already knows what we need, why pray? Because God doesn’t need our information. Prayer changes us. It brings us into communion with the Father, teaches us to trust him, and slowly forms our affections.
For reflection
Who or what is shaping your desires most right now?
When you imagine God listening to your prayer, what image comes to mind: a disappointed judge, a distant king, or a loving Father?
Where might you find a “closed door” in your day: a quiet place, with your phone face down, to be present with God?
It is hard to overstate how startling these first words are. In the Hebrew Bible, God is called the LORD of hosts, the Almighty, the Holy One. He is sometimes compared to a father, carrying Israel “as a father carries his son” (Deuteronomy 1:31), but he is rarely addressed as Father. Jesus takes that rare image and makes it the primary way his followers speak to God. He prayed to God as Abba (Mark 14:36), and now he invites us into his own relationship with the Father.
We do not earn this. We receive it: “to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). By the Spirit we cry, “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15). Children who are securely loved don’t spend each day wondering whether their father delights in them. They simply know, and it gives them peace and courage. That is the place Jesus invites us to pray from.
For some of us, the word father stirs pain: absence, fear, or disappointment. Jesus is not asking us to take our earthly father and enlarge him to cosmic size. He is inviting us to discover the Father he knows, the one all earthly fathers are meant to reflect.
It is our Father, not my Father. In that one word, the prayer confronts our culture’s individualism. We never follow Jesus alone. Whenever we pray “our Father,” we pray alongside believers in every nation, many of them suffering for their faith. Teresa of Ávila, who wrote at length on this prayer, marvelled that in these first words the Son shares his own Father with us. (The Way of Perfection)
The one we call Father is also “in heaven.” “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool” (Isaiah 66:1). He is not limited by space and time as we are. He is “over all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:6): infinitely beyond us, and yet as near as a parent.
For reflection and study
1. What is eternal life? (John 17:3)
2. Read 1 John 5:11–12.
Who gives eternal life, and where is it found?
Who has eternal life?
3. Read Ephesians 2:8–9. Why do human efforts always fail to reach God?
4. Read John 1:12. How does a person receive the gift of salvation?
5. Why does it matter that your salvation rests on God’s faithfulness to you, and not on your own?
6. How does it feel to call God “Father”? What helps, or gets in the way?
7. How might your prayers change if every “our Father” reminded you of the global church?
The prayer does not begin with our needs. Jesus’ first longing is for the Father’s name to be honoured, and he teaches us to share that longing. To hallow means to make holy, to set apart. Our prayer doesn’t make God holy; he already is. We are asking that his holiness be recognized.
In Scripture, a name is more than a label. It is a person’s character and reputation. So to pray “hallowed be your name” is to pray: Father, may people see who you truly are: your goodness, your grace, your steadfast love.
This is what Jesus did. On the night before the cross he prayed, “I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do… I have revealed you” (John 17:4, 6). When people looked at Jesus, they saw what God is like.
God’s people can hallow his name, or profane it. The third commandment, not to misuse God’s name, is about far more than careless words. It means carrying God’s name in a way that contradicts his character. When Israel took back the slaves they had set free, God said, “you have profaned my name” (Jeremiah 34:16). Many people today stay away from church for the same reason: those who carry Christ’s name have not reflected him.
This is not a call to try harder. None of us carries God’s name perfectly. Only Jesus did, and at the cross “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). He takes our failures and gives us his righteousness. Out of gratitude for that great exchange, we want our lives to reveal him.
For reflection
1. How much do you long for God’s name to be honoured? Do you value his reputation enough to change how you live?
2. When people experience you over time, what might they conclude about God?
3. Where in your work, home, or friendships could you make the invisible God a little more visible this week?
Almost everyone, whatever their beliefs, agrees on one thing: the world is not the way it is supposed to be. These lines put that ache into words. New Testament scholar Craig Keener sums up the first half of the prayer this way: “Everything will be set right someday.”
Jesus spoke about the kingdom of God more than anything else, over a hundred times in the Gospels. The kingdom is God’s reign and rule over everything. Israel longed for the Day of the Lord, when God would set the world right: the wicked brought to justice, disease ended, war ceased, death defeated, and the evil one destroyed.
Then Jesus announced, “The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:15). The kingdom had come near because the King had come. When Jesus healed the sick, fed the hungry, freed the captive, and made enemies into friends, the future was breaking into the present (Luke 11:20). As Darrell Johnson puts it, “because the King has come, the kingdom has come.” And because the King is still to come, the kingdom is still to come. We live in the already and not yet.
To pray “your kingdom come” is to ask God to hasten that day, and to offer ourselves to take part in it. The kingdom advances one transformed heart at a time, as people meet Jesus and begin to long for what he longs for. We can pray for the kingdom to come in us, through us, and through our church.
Looking back, many of us thank God that he did not answer some of our prayers the way we wanted. A good parent sometimes says no. God’s will is “good, pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:2). Yet surrender is hard, because another kingdom competes for the throne of our hearts: our own. Augustine called this disordered love: loving good created things more than the Creator.
Jesus shows us the way. In Gethsemane he told the Father honestly what he feared, and then prayed, “Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39). His perfect surrender became our salvation. To pray “your will be done” is to ask: Father, heal my desires, until what you want becomes what I want.
And we can trust him to lead us in it: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5–6).
For reflection and study
1. Read Proverbs 3:5–6. What three things are we told to do?
2. If we do them, what does God promise us?
3. In your own words, describe what each of the three things means.
4. What are some of the ways God guides and leads us?
5. What disappointments have you not yet entrusted to the Father’s goodness?
6. Where are you asking Jesus to bless your plans, rather than surrendering them to his? Who is on the throne of your heart today?
After lifting our eyes to God’s name, kingdom, and will, the prayer suddenly turns to breakfast. The same Father who is setting the whole world right also cares about what we need today. The prophets pictured the Day of the Lord as a feast (Isaiah 25:6), and Jesus spent much of his ministry around tables. Every meal points ahead to that fuller feast.
Martin Luther taught that daily bread means everything we need for our bodily well-being: food and drink, clothing and shelter, health, work, family, even good government and peace. (Small Catechism) The Heidelberg Catechism adds why we ask: so that we may acknowledge God as the only source of every good thing. We receive the gifts, and we worship the Giver.
Jesus does not teach us to pray, “Give us enough that we never need to ask again.” His first listeners would have remembered the manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16). God gave Israel enough bread for each day, no more and no less, and anything hoarded spoiled. He was not only feeding their bodies. He was forming a people who would trust him every morning. The writer of Proverbs prays the same way: “give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread” (Proverbs 30:8). Too little can tempt us to steal; too much can tempt us to forget God.
This petition forms us in two ways that run against our culture:
A dependent people. Our culture prizes self-sufficiency. Jesus, God in the flesh, lived in constant dependence on the Father. Asking daily keeps us honest about who sustains us.
A compassionate people. It is our daily bread, not my daily bread. A Latin American prayer says it well: O God, to those who have hunger, give bread; and to those who have bread, give the hunger for justice. When we pray for bread, we pray for the whole chain that brings it: the rain and soil, farmers and truckers, fair prices and fair wages, and those in our own city who go without.
The deeper hunger
Jesus told the crowds who followed him for more bread, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry” (John 6:35). We do not live on bread alone, “but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Fittingly, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which means “house of bread.”
Jesus promises that the Father hears: “Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete” (John 16:24). God may answer yes, no, or wait, but he always answers as a good Father.
For reflection and study
1. In your own words, what is prayer?
2. Read John 15:7 and 1 John 5:14–15. What are some important conditions for answered prayer?
3. God may answer our prayers with yes, no, or wait. When have you experienced each? Which is hardest to receive?
4. In what ways have you drifted toward self-sufficiency, believing you can meet your own deepest needs?
5. If you have more than enough for today, how could you take part in God’s provision of bread for others?
6. What would it look like for you to receive Jesus, the bread of life, today?
Most of us find it very hard to say, simply, “I was wrong.” Since Adam blamed Eve in the garden, we have reached for excuses before honesty. Notice that Jesus does not teach us to pray, “Forgive us if we have debts.” He teaches us to tell the truth about ourselves.
The early theologian Origen described three kinds of debt: what we owe to others, what we owe to ourselves, and what we owe to God, to love him with our whole being. And our debt is not only the wrong we have done, but the good we have left undone.
Our instinct with debt is to pay it down: pray more, serve more, give more, until the good outweighs the bad. But this is a debt none of us can pay. The good news is that God has paid it for us. He “forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross” (Colossians 2:13–14). The one who teaches us to pray “forgive us our debts” is the one who paid them.
So confession is not a matter of beating ourselves up. “God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance” (Romans 2:4). The Spirit convicts us so that we can heal and flourish. The enemy condemns us, telling us our failure is all we are. But “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).
This is the only line of the prayer that Jesus comments on afterward (Matthew 6:14–15). In the parable of the unmerciful servant (Matthew 18:21–35), a man forgiven an unpayable debt goes out and chokes someone who owes him a little. We are outraged, until we realize the parable is about us. The mercy we receive from God is meant to become the mercy we extend.
This is not easy, and Jesus never pretends it is. C. S. Lewis admitted that everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea “until they have something to forgive.” (Mere Christianity) Our culture of retaliation trains us in revenge. In Scripture, forgiveness is a sign of the Spirit’s supernatural power: Jesus on the cross praying, “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34), and Stephen, full of the Spirit, praying the same for those stoning him (Acts 7:60).
If the word forgiveness is painful for you, please hear this:
Forgiveness does not deny what happened, or say it didn’t matter.
Forgiveness is not “forgive and forget.”
Forgiveness does not mean staying in an abusive situation, or removing boundaries with someone who is still unsafe.
Forgiveness does not cancel the pursuit of justice. It hands vengeance to God: “Do not take revenge… It is mine to avenge; I will repay, says the Lord” (Romans 12:19).
No one should be pressured to forgive before they are ready. Some wounds are so deep that we are not yet able to write a blank cheque. If that is you, your prayer today may simply be: Father, meet me where I am. Bring healing, until forgiveness can become my next step.
For reflection and study
1. Read 1 John 1:9. What does God want you to do with your sin? What does that mean?
2. In forgiving us, how is God described? What has he promised to do?
3. Read Hebrews 10:17. If you have already confessed your sin to God, why is it unnecessary to keep carrying guilt for it?
4. What is the difference between the Spirit’s conviction and the enemy’s condemnation? Which voice have you been listening to?
5. Why do you think Jesus ties our forgiveness to our forgiving others?
6. Is there a debt the Spirit is inviting you to bring to the Father? Is there a debtor you could begin to entrust to him?
This petition names a real spiritual battle: a battle over what we believe about God, and over who we are becoming. Since the serpent’s first words, “Did God really say?” (Genesis 3:1), the enemy’s strategy has been to plant suspicion: Is God holding back from you? Can you really trust him this time?
Scripture says plainly that God tempts no one (James 1:13). So why pray “lead us not into temptation”? The Greek word, peirasmos, can mean a test, a trial, or a temptation. God uses trials to grow us: “the testing of your faith produces perseverance” (James 1:2–4). But the evil one tries to take that same trial and turn it into temptation, to drag us away from God (James 1:14–15). Two believers can face the same cancer diagnosis; one is drawn closer to Jesus, while the other is tempted to distrust him.
So we are not asking to be spared every trial. We are asking: Father, may this test not lead me away from you.
In Gethsemane, Jesus told his closest friends, “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation” (Mark 14:38). Peter later wrote, “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion” (1 Peter 5:8). Watchfulness means knowing where we are vulnerable: what desire is being stirred, and what lie we are starting to believe. In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis imagines a senior demon advising that the best strategy is not dramatic evil but simple distraction, keeping a person so busy that they stop attending to God.
The Greek says literally “the evil,” usually translated “the evil one.” Jesus calls the devil “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). He lies to us about God, about ourselves (that our failures define us), and about one another (so that we isolate ourselves).
Yet the evil one is not the focus of the prayer. The Father is. “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you” (James 4:7–8). And we never face trials alone. We can ask our brothers and sisters, “Will you pray for me?”, and let them remind us of what is true.
The one who taught us this prayer has already faced the darkness and won. Jesus was tempted in the wilderness and emerged faithful (Matthew 4:1–11; Hebrews 4:15), and at the cross he disarmed the powers and triumphed over them (Colossians 2:15). We are not left alone in temptation: “God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it” (1 Corinthians 10:13).
For reflection and study
1. Read 1 Corinthians 10:13. What is true about every temptation you face? Why can this be reassuring?
2. Who gives you victory over temptation?
3. Does God always remove temptation? What are some reasons God might allow you to be tempted? (Read also James 1.)
4. Where do you habitually give your attention? Where do you trust something other than God?
5. What lie does the enemy tend to repeat to you in times of trial: about God, yourself, or others?
6. Who could you ask to watch and pray with you?
Every line of the Lord’s Prayer is a summary of Jesus’ own life:
He hallowed the Father’s name, revealing what God is like.
He announced and embodied the kingdom, healing, feeding, and freeing.
He surrendered his will in Gethsemane: “not as I will, but as you will.”
He trusted the Father for bread, refusing to turn stones into loaves.
He forgave from the cross: “Father, forgive them.”
He faced temptation and overcame the evil one, through the cross and the empty tomb.
So when we pray the prayer he taught, we are not only saying his words. We are being formed, slowly and by the Spirit, into his likeness.
Many Christians close the prayer with a doxology: For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. It does not appear in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew, but a form of it appears in one of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, the Didache, and the church has prayed it for centuries. It is true, and we can pray it with integrity.
The Lord’s Prayer is not only words to repeat; it is a pattern to pray by. Eugene Peterson said that prayer is not a second language, but the language at the core of who we are. Here are a few ways to make it your own:
Memorize it, and pray it slowly each day: on waking, at a pause in the workday, before sleep.
Pray one line at a time, pausing to let each petition gather your own needs, people, and concerns.
Find a closed door: a quiet place, with your phone face down, where you can be present with the Father.
Pray the Psalms. They are the church’s school of prayer, and they will give you words when you have none.
Pray it together. It is our Father. Ask others to pray with you, and for you.
The discipline of prayer
1. Read James 4:3. Thinking back over the assurances above, what does God promise us about prayer?
2. Describe prayer in your own words. Why is prayer important?
3. What obstacles in your life keep you from spending regular time in prayer?
The Lord’s Prayer gives us the pattern. The Psalms give us the vocabulary. They are a unique part of Scripture: not only God’s word to us, but words for us to speak back to God. The fourth-century bishop Athanasius said that most of Scripture speaks to us, but the Psalms speak for us. (Letter to Marcellinus) Eugene Peterson called prayer answering God, and the Psalms are where we learn that language. Jesus quoted the Psalms more than any other book of the Hebrew Bible, and prayed them even from the cross (Psalm 22:1; 31:5). When we pray the Psalms, we pray as Jesus prayed.
Athanasius pictured the Psalms tuning us like the strings of an instrument: plucked, tightened, and released again and again, until our hearts sound right to the one who set the pitch.
The 150 Psalms are gathered into five books. Psalms 1 and 2 set the direction: a life rooted in God’s word and God’s king. Psalms 3 to 145 travel through every human emotion: grief, anger, fear, guilt, trust, gratitude, and wonder. Nothing is too raw to bring to God. Then Psalms 146 to 150 arrive at a resounding refrain, Hallelujah, “Praise the LORD!” The whole collection moves us, through the ups and downs of life, toward joy.
They retune our trust. The Psalms keep exposing where we place our hope: in leaders, experts, or our own abilities, none of whom can finally save. Again and again they turn us back to the living God. In the Psalms, to be blessed means to be truly happy, and that happiness is found in God himself. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who prayed the Psalms through two years in a Nazi prison, wrote near the end of his life that God’s joy bursts open closed doors.
They work obedience in us. Often the psalmists don’t promise to try harder. They ask God to do the work: teach me, give me understanding, turn my heart, give me life. Obedience begins in prayer, as God shapes us from the inside. As Peterson puts it, “a stiff upper lip won’t do it.”
For reflection
1. Which kind of psalm do you most need right now: praise, confession, thanks, lament, or trust?
2. Where are you tempted to put your trust in someone or something other than God?
3. Is there an area of your life where, instead of promising to try harder, you could ask God to do the work?
Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus (on the Psalms)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible
Darrell W. Johnson, Fifty-Seven Words That Change the World: A Journey through the Lord’s Prayer
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters
Jonathan T. Pennington, The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing
Eugene H. Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer
Teresa of Ávila, The Way of Perfection
Tertullian, On Prayer
N. T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer